All India Conference of Entertainment Workers

[Guest guest]

Dear Madam/Sir,

Please accept the best wishes of and greetings from the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya

Committee (DMSC), Kolkata, West Bengal , India.

You may be aware of the fact that we are working for the prevention and control

of sexually transmitted diseases, HIV and AIDS, in the sex work sites of the

different districts of West Bengal, for the last 14 years. Presently our work is

no more confined to the control and prevention of sexually transmitted

infections.

We are working for the all-round development of sex workers and, of other

marginalized people of our land. We organized ourselves into the DMSC more than

a decade ago, on the 12th of July 1995, to carry on our struggle against all

forms of injustice, violence, oppression, exploitation and health hazards that

exist continually in and around our sex work sites and sex work.

We firmly believe that we the sex workers provide entertainment to our

customers. We provide sexual pleasure. Every one has the right to seek pleasure

and happiness. Like the other entertainment workers of the world, we use our

brain, ideas, emotion and sense organs, in short our entire body and our mind to

make people happy. As Entertainment workers, we seek governmental recognition

and, fulfillment of our just professional demands. For this purpose we have

organized the Binodini Sramik Union.

As artists engaged in the entertainment sector we believe that the need for

entertainment existed in the lives of human beings in the past, it exists now

and, it will exist in the future. In the absence of entertainment, the joy of

living vanishes from our lives; life becomes a mechanical and tedious journey.

Today the laboring people are under ever increasing occupational, familial,

social and economic pressure. We are becoming ever more tired, exhausted. Our

ability to work in getting reduced. We re becoming intolerant.

We also notice that the governments of most countries do not understand and do

not care about this situation. Usually our governments are ignorant, intolerant,

dogmatic, oppressive and tyrannical about the reality of human need for leisure,

pleasure, happiness and entertainment, about the various types of entertainment

workers, and about the reality and variety of their professions. Such attitudes

governed by ignorance and intolerance are detrimental to the growth of our human

resources. If we destroy our human resources, then how shall we develop and

grow? Only entertainment can liberate us from the suffocating environment that

surrounds us daily, hourly and, help us become healthy and normal.

Today many forms of folk dance and music are on the verge of extinction. Many

modern forms of entertainment, like the dance of the dance bar girls of

Maharashtra, have been banned illegally. Like the captains of all other

industry, the captains of entertainment industry too try to pay their workers as

little as they can.

To maintain this regime of lowest possible wages, they divide and rule the

entertainment workers. In this work of dividing and sowing the seeds of rift

among the entertainment workers, they are assisted by a group of intellectuals

and barons of the social service sector, who hawk the dominant ideologies that

permanently label and classify the entertainment workers and artists into

ancient and modern, classical and folk, genteel and vulgar, moral and immoral,

adult and non-adult, meant for the cultured or for the uncultured people etc.

etc.

Once these labels are stuck, and the workers are segregated, they drift apart

and, themselves stoke the fires of these divisions, at no extra cost for their

bosses.

Many entertainment workers fail to recognize themselves as workers for their

entire life. Yet another way of keeping such division alive is to stigmatize

some entertainment workers and, thus marginalize them within the society. It is

thus that our sex workers are forced to lead a near-criminal life stigmatized by

both law and social sanction.

Folk singers and dancers are stigmatized as indecent people and harassed.

'Upper' caste men keep women entertainers from the 'lower' castes under their

jackboots. The Bauls in Bengal are beaten up by bigots. The Tamasha artists are

facing threats in Maharashtra.

It is in such circumstances that we hope to create on united movement and

organization of all the entertainment workers of all countries of the world - be

they Bauls, Nats, sex workers, dancers, instrument players, singers, actors and

actress, circus artists, Bahurupees, painters or sculptors - we hope to unite

all of them.

There are many entertainment workers in India and the rest of the world who are

weak, who fail to gain the limelight, who live outside the pale of media glare.

Then again there are many who enjoy social and political power and prestige, who

always bask in media glare. We must try to break the resultant walls of power,

prestige and wealth that divide our entertainment workers.

We want equitable economic, social and, political status for all entertainment

workers. We demand that the entertainment workers be recognized as special

type of workers and, a special labour law be enacted for them.

With this aim in view, we are organizing an All India Conference of

Entertainment Workers at the Rabindra Kanan (nee Company Bagan), Kolkata, from

the 25 th of February to the 3rd of March 2007 . We want you to be with us in

that conference: not merely as a spectator of listener, we want you to

participate as our comrade. We hope that you will join us. We hope to meet you

at the conference.

Thank you.

Bishakha Laskar

Govinda Saha

(Joint Convenors)

ALL INDIA CONFERENCE OF ENTERTAINMENT WORKERS

12/5 Nilmoni Mitra Street , Kolkata-700 006

Phone : 033 2533 6514

Tele-fax: 033 2530 6619/3148,

E-mail: durbar.ec2007@...,

Web site: www.durbar.org